Much has been written about the death of the professional critic, and maybe it's all true. Maybe we're set to be replaced by some combination of algorithms and anonymous online commentary and plain old-fashioned ignorance. But even in a future where pro-critics will no longer help you make up your mind about what to see, we will still serve one vital function, I believe. We will enable people to fake it. We will help readers through movies that they know they should see, that everybody is talking about, but which they just can't bring themselves to go to a theater and unfork thirteen dollars and sit there for two hours to see. Cloud Atlas is just such a film. It's not a movie you want to see, but it's definitely a movie you want to have seen. I'm here to help.

Everything you might worry about based on the trailers is true. The six intertwined plots do not particularly hold together, and they grow increasingly confusing as the film progresses. These vary from a nineteenth-century sea-travel narrative to a satire about old folks' homes to a futuristic consumerist dystopia. In the novel, the plots are contained in a Chinese box structure, each story nestled in another, which allows for the diversity of the plots to gel. It also gives the reader time to focus on each story in turn. So the journey to a plantation is not abutting against the science fiction and so on. The movie could not hold onto this pattern for obvious reasons, and so all the plots are stuffed in with each other like a poorly made trifle; every scene feels like a distraction from all the other scenes and the dominant effect is to lend everything an air of absurdity. When the everyman of Tom Hanks abuts the aristocratic prewar British glamour of Ben Whishaw as the young renegade composer Robert Frobisher, neither performance comes across well in the comparison. Hanks seems hokey, and Whishaw seems pretentious. It's lose-lose.

On the other hand, I'm not entirely kidding when I say that this is a film you want to be able to talk about without having to see. There is much in it that's fascinating and worth discussing. The vision of an all-consuming capitalist world in Neo-Seoul is terrific. The primary conceit of Cloud Atlas — a work that is both historical fiction and science fiction — remains, and I don't know why there aren't hundreds of books and movies that work that same way. Also, the idea that civilization is something lost and found and lost and found, rather than a force that either grows to perfection or sinks away to oblivion, is more than a little refreshing. In the movies, the future tends to look either like the blissfully Utopian world of Star Trek or the total dystopia of Hunger Games et al. The level of sophistication here is high and genuinely intriguing.

But all that stuff can be found in the book, which, if you haven't read, you should. Cloud Atlas was a wonderfully surprising and profound novel when it came out in 2004, and its stature has only grown. It's the rare book that only becomes more memorable with time. Cloud Atlas is the definitive proof of the old cliché about how good books make bad movies and vice versa. In the book, the relationships between the plots produce an intense experience of literary vertigo: They seem to call up the question of how any story relates to any other, how people understand each other in the first place, and how even the most insignificant detail can transform utterly when given a new context. The filmmakers have tried to replicate this experience by the use of sappy music and montages, and in the process have converted what was magical and extraordinary into what is banal and insipid. Insights that seemed somewhat radical in the book, and off-kilter, become the kind of boilerplate it's-all-related stuff that you might hear out of a California Buddhist trying to sell you a weekend getaway at an ashram.

So, if you want to talk about Cloud Atlas the movie without having seen it, what do you say?

"I hope they win the Oscar for nose-wrangling." Tom Hanks is at least taking big risks in this movie, which is nice to see. But the price is that he has to appear in a series of false noses in a series of different times, as though every era were defined by its nasality. You can also comfortably assert that the movie will not possibly win the Oscar for anything else.

"Neo-Seoul was great, but it looked less futuristic than Psy's video." As a general rule, a gentleman wants to mention "Gangnam Style" as little as possible in polite society, but this case is an exception. It is weird that Seoul looks much more frantic and consumerist in the present than science fiction can even imagine.

"The fact that Cloud Atlas didn't win the Booker just shows how full of shit literary prizes are." This neatly gets you off of the subject of the movie you haven't seen, and on to wider cultural complaining.

Of course, what you should say is either "I don't want to ruin the book" or "I'm going to read the book instead." That's all you really need to say.